‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ a waiter greets me in the garden.
Even in the early morning the air is mellow. Chestnuts have begun to fall; bright crimson leaves are shrivelling. The sky is cloudless.
‘Well, old lady,’ my father says. There is a single rose, pink bled with scarlet, which he has picked for me. On my birthday he always finds a rose somewhere.
‘What shall we do today?’ my mother asks when she has poured my coffee and my father remembers the year of the Pilgrims’ Way, when he took me on his back because I was tired, when we met the old man who told us about Saint Sisinnius. He remembers the balloon trip and the year of the casino. Birthdays are always an occasion, my mother’s in July, my father’s in May, mine in October.
We live in hotels. We’ve done so since we left the house in the square, all kinds of hotels, in the different countries of Europe, a temporary kind of life it seemed at first, acquiring permanence later.
‘So what shall we do?’ my mother asks again.
It is my choice because of the day and after I’ve opened the presents they’ve given me, after I’ve embraced them and thanked them, I say that what I’d like to do is to walk through the birch woods and have a picnic where the meadows begin.
‘Moi, je suis tous les sports,’ a man is telling his friend at the table next to ours. ‘Il n’y en a pas un seul auquel je ne m’ intéresse pas.’
I can hear now, thirty-five years later, that man’s rippling voice. I can see the face I glimpsed, bespectacled and pink, and hear his companion ordering thé de Ceylan.
‘It will be lovely, that walk today,’ my mother says, and we choose our picnic and after breakfast go to buy the different items and put our lunch together ourselves.
‘Why do you always find a rose for me?’
I ask that on our walk, when my mother is quite far ahead of my father and myself. I have not chosen the moment; it is not because my mother isn’t there; there’s never anything like that.
‘Oh, there isn’t a reason for a rose, you know. It’s just that sometimes a person wants to give one.’
‘You make everything good for me.’
‘Because it is your birthday.’
‘I didn’t mean only on my birthday.’
My mother has reached the meadows and calls back to us. When we catch up with her the picnic is already spread out, the wine uncorked.
‘When your father and I first met,’ she says once lunch has begun, ‘he was buying a film for his camera and found himself short. That’s how we met, in a little shop. He was embarrassed so I lent him a few coins from my purse.’
‘Your mother has always had the money.’
‘And it has never made a difference. An inheritance often does; but by chance, I think, this one never has.’
‘No, it has never made a difference. But before we say another word we must drink a toast to today.’
My father pours the wine. ‘You must not drink yourself, Villana. That isn’t ever done.’
‘Then may I have a toast to you? Is that ever done?’
‘Well, do it and then it shall be.’
‘Thank you for my birthday.’
In the sudden manner he often has my father says:
‘Marco Polo was the first traveller to bring back to Europe an account of the Chinese Empire. No one believed him. No one believed that the places he spoke of, or the people – not even Kublai Khan – existed. That is the history lesson for today, old lady. Or history and geography all in one. It doesn’t matter how we think of it.’
‘In German “to think” is denken,’ my mother interposes. ‘And in Italian?’
‘Pensare. And credere of course.’
‘This ham is delicious,’ my father says.
They took me from England because that was best. I never went to school again. They taught me in their way, and between them they knew a lot: they taught me everything. My father’s ambitions as an Egyptologist fell away. Once upon a time when he went on his travels – always determined to make discoveries that had not been made before – he scrimped and saved in order to be independent in his marriage, and in Egypt often slept on park benches. But after we left the house in the square my father had no profession; he became the amateur he once regarded as a status he despised. His books did not remain unwritten, but he did not ever want to publish them.
‘Oh, how good this is!’ he says, his soft voice hardly heard when my birthday picnic is over, the wine all drunk. We lie, all three of us, in the warm autumn sun, and then I pack the remains of the picnic into the haversack and think that my father is right, that this is good, even that it is happiness.
‘I worry sometimes he does not get enough exercise,’ my mother remarks on our journey back, going by a different way, my father’s turn now to be a little ahead. Often, it seems to me, it is deliberately arranged that I should always be in the company of one or other of them.
‘Doesn’t he get enough?’
‘Well, it could be more.’
‘Papa’s not ill?’
‘No, not at all. Not at all. But in the nature of things…’
She does not finish what she might have said, but I know what follows. In the nature of things neither she nor my father will always be there. I sense her guessing that I have finished her sentence for her, for that is how we live, our conversations incomplete, or never begun at all. They have between them created an artefact within which our existence lies, an artefact as scrupulously completed as a masterpiece on a mosaicist’s table. My father accepts what he has come to know – which I believe is everything – of my mother’s unfaithfulness. There is no regret on my mother’s part that I can tell, nor is there bitterness on his; I never heard a quarrel. They sacrifice their lives for me: the change of surroundings, constantly repeated, the anonymous furniture of hotels, nothing as it has been – for my sake, no detail is overlooked. In thanking them I might say my gratitude colours every day, but they do not want me to say that, not even to mention gratitude in such a manner because it would be too much.
‘Quel après-midi splendide!’
‘Ah, oui! on pent le dire.’
‘J‘adore ce moment de lajournée.’
Often my mother and I break into one of the languages she has taught me; as if, for her, a monotony she does not permit is broken. Does she – do they – regret the loss of the house in London, as I do? Do they imagine the changes there might be, the blue hall door a different colour, business plates beside it, a voice on the intercom when one of the bells is rung? What is the drawing-room now? Is there a consulate in the ground-floor rooms, stately men going back and forth, secretaries with papers to be signed? All that I know with certainty – and they must too – is that the violets of my bedroom wallpaper have been painted away to nothing, that gone from the hall are the shipyard scenes in black and white, the Cries of London too. They may even wonder, as I do, if the chill of the past is in that house, if the ghosts of my childhood companions haunt its rooms, for since leaving England I have never been able to bring them to life again.
‘C’est vraiment très beau là-bas,’ my mother says when we catch up with my father, who has already begun to gather chestnuts. We watch a bird which he says is something rare, none of us knowing what it is. There is a boy at the hotel to whom we’ll give the chestnuts, each of us knowing as we do so that this will become another birthday memory, spoken of, looked back to.
‘Ernest Shackleton was a most remarkable man,’ my father comments in his abrupt way. ‘Maybe the finest of all those men who were remarkable for making the freezing winds a way of life, and ice a landscape, whose grail was the desolation at the end of the world’s most terrible journeys. Can you imagine them, those men before him and all who followed later? Secrets kept from one another, ailments hidden, their prayers, their disappointments? Such adversity, yet such spirit! We are strangely made, we human beings, don’t you think?’